The Wordbee Beebox connector is a plugin for the Translation Management Tool Module. It connects a Drupal site with a Wordbee Beebox server for the purpose of streamlining translation processes. The plugin sends translation requests to a Beebox server and automatically receives back translations.

This episode we welcome Jess Snyder who is on the planning committee for GovCon, coming up real soon in August, to talk about… GovCon.. Which is coming up real soon in August. We’ll cover some Drupal News, it looks like Bob has the Pro Project Pick this episode and Ryan will bring it to a close with The Final Bell.

A plan for Drupal and Composer https://dri.es/a-plan-for-drupal-and-composer
“The first phase of the proposal is focused on a series of changes in the main Drupal core repository. The directory structure will remain the same, but it will include scripts, plugins, and embedded packages that enable the bundled Drupal product to be built from the core repository using Composer. This provides users who download Drupal from Drupal.org a clear path to manage their Drupal codebase with Composer if they choose.”

“Automatic Updates Initiative. We are exploring if an automated update system can be build on top of the Composer Initiative's work, and provide an abstraction layer for those that don't want to use Composer directly. I believe that could be truly game-changing for Drupal, as it would remove a great deal of complexity.”

These module becomes a spatial module providing lines, points and polygones as field types. The actually version only works with a speciall kind of textfields, the version 1.0 would get a real support for the database fields polygon, line and point. The 2.0 has the target to support the database functions, intersect, distance, within/without.

The Omeda module provides basic Drupal integration to the Omeda API. It will allow you to connect to the API, automatically store comprehensive brand config in state based on a cron run, provide a retry queue for failed API calls, and configure basic settings including whether or not to force immediate processing of requests.

This module will expand as it is the base module for other modules in progress, such as Omeda Subscriptions and Omeda Customers.

The Omeda Subscriptions module extends the Omeda base module to provide users the ability to manage their deployment Opt Ins and Opt Outs via a new tab on their user profile. There is a custom permission to determine which roles can manage their subscriptions and there is also a configuration page to allow you to enable which deployment preferences are manageable by the user.

Save the date(s): 10-12 August! And join us for a 3-day conference on building with Drupal, driving this open-source technology forward and strengthening & growing the community behind it: Drupal North Regional Summit 2018.

Meet us at our exhibit booth at the Toronto Reference Library, to be more specific. We'll be right there, in the hallway, since OPTASY's a proud gold sponsor of the fourth edition of this annual event:

The biggest annual summit in Canada focused on promoting Drupal.

Why Would You Attend Drupal North Regional Summit 2018?

That's right: why would you pack your bags and get en route for Toronto's Reference Library when summer is at its peak and everyone's looking for a place in the sun?

Governance plays a pivotal role in the business workflow and is significant for the smooth functioning of an organisation which is expanding at a steadfast pace. In this digitised world of organised chaos, demand for agile marketing has resulted in the accretion of digital assets to such an extent that some of them seem superfluous. Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Drupal can come together to smartly strategise the way enterprises handle unimportant assets.

A superabundance of assets clog up our devices and blot out the productivity. Digital Asset Management can help enterprises in eclipsing outmoded asset management processes and take back control of their digital files. Therefore, it helps in optimising content processes and makes life much easier.

Decoding the Digital Asset Management

What is involved in digital asset management? DAM is a content management and branding automation system which uses the centralised mode of storing and governing voluminous digital files. It accredits enterprises to connect, control, and centralise both the local and the global access to digital files thereby ensuring that digital assets are accessible to everyone whenever they have the dire need of them.

Source: Cognizant

Grid, The Guardian’s image management system, is a very good example of an open source digital asset management system. Its team used pragmatic agile processes to build it quickly. It is now incorporated with its print workflow and is used for almost half of the images used in their digital content.

Does it ring a bell? Definitely! Content Management System (CMS) like Drupal also has its foundation in the provision of a centralised mode of content dissemination. So what’s the difference between CMS and DAM?

Difference between DAM and CMS

Content Management System and Digital Asset Management are two systems that work brilliantly with the digital content but are designed for different tasks.

In general, Content Management System, for example, Drupal, is the entire foundation for governing content on the website. The term ‘content’ means anything that is displayed on your site and not just blog posts which are managed by CMS.

In contrast, a Digital Asset Management manages more than just your website. It powers the entire sales and marketing organisation. It acts as the central repository for the approved assets. Moreover, it is the collaborative workflow engine between marketers and designers for the creation, assessment, and approval of those assets.

Cuts business costs: It can improve your ROI through quicker creation, retrieval, and dissemination of company content. Do-it-yourself design templates for business cards, banner ads etc. cut both internal and external admin, design, and production costs.

Integration scope: It seamlessly integrates with your existing infrastructure. It helps you in improving project management, delegating resources and roles, optimising and targeting assets, and identifying top-performing content by working with CMS, customer relationship management (CRM) and several other marketing, sales and IT solutions.

Time-Saving: It provides 24X7 access to company collateral from anywhere. Thus, it removes the need for time-intensive file searches and avoids the need for recreating missing assets.

Choosing the Best Digital Asset Management for your Business

So, how to strategise in order to choose the best Digital Asset Management? It is important that you understand your prerequisites before making the decision of selecting a Digital Asset Management.

Understanding DAM capabilities

Repository: One of the first things that you need to consider is a core digital asset repository. A centralised asset repository should on the top of the priority list for efficacy in controlling and governing the assets.

Creation: Through workflow and collaboration tools, can help with the creation of assets. If you have multiple departments or have agencies working together to create digital assets, it can make the process of creation of assets faster and makes its easier to assess and approve them. It also ensures that everyone uses the same transparent process. Workflow management tools pre-defines stages and roles so that you can know the status of every asset and their requirements instantly.

Consumption: It depends on people and systems to determine how these assets are being used. Your Digital Asset Management should be able to provide a way for employees to search for and download assets on their own.

Understanding your Goals

It should simplify the production of digital assets.

It should improve the quality, consistency, and on-brand of assets being created especially in the enterprises with global digital marketing teams.

It should be able to allow the organisation to keep a record of all the assets without leaving a question mark on where to add them or their approval status.

It should alleviate manual requests that are being made by the marketing team to provide specific files to several people and groups like logos, product images, campaign assets, sales collateral etc.

It must master your brand consistency.

It should decrease the time taken to integrate assets into digital marketing campaigns and user experiences.

Understanding your Users

Develop a list of stakeholders, people in your organisation, and even outside of your organisation who will be interacting with Digital Asset Management.

Understand what their access and roles are with the Digital Asset Management.

Understanding your Requirements

Get the feedback from each of your stakeholder groups. Know what are their most common challenges and build a list of requirements. Make sure to understand the use cases so that you can prioritise those requirements.

Digital Asset Management systems have the capability to fulfill the need of basic requirements of small teams to extremely intricate ones for sophisticated large teams.

Keep a note of typical requirements of organisations utilising Digital Asset Management as mentioned in the tabular column below.

RequirementDescription

Asset Approval

Processes required to create a new asset should be well managed

Asset Review

A collaborative asset review cycle for the people to add comments, markups, and feedback to asset proofs

Asset Access (Internal)

A portal for employees to search and download assets. Access control by region or department would be required

Asset Access (External)

A controlled asset access for the external users paving the way for secure sharing of assets with partners, contractors, agencies etc.

Branding guidelines

A self-serve access point to get the approved branding guidelines like product images, logos, color palettes etc.

Deployment options for Digital Asset Management constitute on-premise, private cloud, and Software-as-as-Service (SaaS). To understand what works best for your business needs, let’s look at the merits and demerits of these deployment options.

On-PremisePrivate CloudSaaSMerit

Flexibility in integration

Low costs

Data in cloud

Local performance

Data in cloud

Comparatively fast to implement

Great for heavy customisations

Accessibility

Low Cost

On-premise control of data

Lessens dependence on IT

Low risks involved

Moderate customisations possible

Great multi-location performance

Security/control

Resilience/failover

Somewhat scalable

Scalable

Very basic resilience/failover

Good integration scope

Quick implementation

Automatic upgrades

Least requirement of IT dependency

Demerit

Huge risks involved

Dependency on web

Dependency on web

Not cost effective

Usually, web hosting requires third parties

Very limited customisation

Not scalable

Responsible for maintenance and upgrades

Data off-premise

Very limited accessibility

Data off-premise

Responsible for upgrades and maintenance

Dependence on IT

Time-intensive during deployment

Drupal modules for DAM Integration

Acquia DAM offers a centralised cloud repository to keep all creative assets systematised, tagged and searchable throughout the lifecycle of those assets. Its easy-to-use workflow and collaboration capability lets digital marketers and designers search, review, approve and publish assets faster

Media: Acquia DAM, Drupal module, helps in the integration of Drupal with Acquia DAM. The integration helps Drupal content editors to browse the Acquia DAM repository using their own credentials via an entity browser plugin. They can search by keyword in order to find the right assets for the usage. WYSIWYG editor allows content authors to add assets easily. The assets marked for the usage are copied to Drupal and are stored as Media Entity references thereby rendering image styles.

Through a cron job, these assets are kept in sync between Drupal and Acquia DAM. Updates made to the assets are automatically reflected in Drupal.

This module provides a media entity provider for importing asset metadata into fields on your entities. Users can view the metadata directly in the entity browser without having to import the assets. It also provides a usage report of an asset within Drupal.

Another very useful digital asset management solution is Bynder which is a cloud-based platform for digital marketing teams to create, find, and use digital content.

Bynder integration Drupal module aids in the integration of Drupal with Bynder thereby providing seamless access to asset bank on your website. Users can import assets from and upload assets to Bynder. Image styles imported from Bynder can be displayed to match the derivatives created.

Media entity module made it possible to represent Bynder assets in Drupal without actually copying them over. Its powerful metadata API helped in exposing and using all the information about them in the context of a Drupal website. It offered a central management of assets and their full availability on sites which consume them.

Entity browser module helped in implementing a user-friendly interface for letting the users browse their Bynder assets from the editor’s node of their Drupal site.

DropzoneJS driven widget helped in uploading the right assets into the Bynder DAM directly from the Drupal site.

Case study

Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel aka Sardar Patel was India’s first Deputy Prime Minister and played a pivotal role in India’s freedom movement. The Sardar Patel website, built on Drupal 8 with the help of an agency, showcases information about him gathered from numerous libraries.

The digital assets of more than 2000 content records related to the man events in the life of Sardar Patel can be viewed in the Sardar Patel website.

Objectives

The main goal behind building a dedicated site was to access books, texts, videos, audios, and similar content about him in multiple languages. By gathering and standardising the available digital assets, everything about him would be present in an easily searchable form. This would, thus, help in preserving the history of India’s influential freedom struggle through digital content for the generations to come.

Drupal 8 to the rescue

The scalability of Drupal 8 helped in migrating 2000+ content from several different sources under a single umbrella.
It also lent a mobile-first user experience.
Drupal’s out-of-the-box capabilities for building a multilingual site helped in translating the content into multiple languages.
Moreover, being the most security focussed CMS, it turned out to be the best choice for the website.

Result

1 TB of data comprising of 1000 images, 800 textual content, numerous audio and video recordings were added as content in addition to keeping the site navigation simple and easy. Most importantly, importing of content in bulk was possible with Drupal 8 thereby streamlining the content migration process and saving a lot of time.

For easy access, the website content was sorted and arranged by the main events or themes in addition to the chronological order of events that transpired in his life.

The site has easy search capability with filter options enabled to zero in on a particular subject.

What the Future holds for DAM?

Mobile applications would be at the epicentre of Digital Asset Management in the coming years. Native applications offer a seamless user experience both online and offline. Connected directly to your asset bank, they provide a mobile marketing portal and interactive features that help in creating, handling, and using the digital content on the fly. No matter what is the location of the user and whether or not they are near their laptop or desktop, they can always work with assets.

Number of mobile phone users worldwide from 2015 to 2020 (in billions) from Statista

Artificial Intelligence technology is becoming more mainstream, affordable and accessible. Digital Asset Management can leverage the benefits of AI for automating processes and centralising tasks. Also, features like facial, location, and image recognition variables; geospatial technology, and deterministic reasoning capabilities will be the key to utilising AI.

Machine learning, as shown in this graph, would require 2 to 5 years for mainstream adoption from Gartner

Machine learning algorithms can be of great use for Digital Asset Management in the future. It can recommend assets for a particular channel or task within a campaign based on analytical data. This would help you in promptly selecting the best asset swiftly without wasting the time thinking over which video, image or banner will best serve your digital marketing pursuits.

Conclusion

With the rapid expansion of businesses, digital assets like images, videos and company documents are piling up to an unimaginable extent. It is imperative that a proper governance is incorporated to handle these increasing digitised assets. Drupal 8 can be a wonderful option to integrate Digital Asset Management to manage your organisation’s increasing online presence and its ever-growing digital assets.

Drupal development is our key service where we are excelling since our birth as a company. Ping us at hello@opensenselabs.com to instill the best asset management solution for your enterprise using Drupal 8.

Path Alias Force provides functionality to create forced aliases for entities in a multilingual environment while using the language hierarchy system. This means that whenever you create a node in a specific language and you have other languages which fallback to it, this module will automatically generate aliases for every other language besides the source one.

This is a geolocation receiver module who involved in Drupal poll(admin/pollgeolocation/show), this module has some dependencies which Requires:Poll, Field, Node, Text, Filter, User, System, Options, Views.

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